


do not go gentle into the good night

by illyrias



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 16:57:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2236521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illyrias/pseuds/illyrias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She grew up in silence and shadows, and silence and shadows she became.</p>
            </blockquote>





	do not go gentle into the good night

Espionage is cold warfare. It is silence; deafening, deafening silence, with only the rhythmic beat of your heart and the rush of cold blood through your veins to keep you company. Silence is your gun.

Espionage is cold warfare. It is shadows; living constantly as a blur of black and grey and blue, in the corners of eyes, blending in with the dark, dark night. The shadow is your shield.

Espionage is cold warfare. It is a lot of things, but it is not human; it is whatever it requires you to be.

Espionage is cold warfare. She would know.

-

Natalia is more things than she can count, but she is nothing.

She grew up in silence and shadows, and silence and shadows she became.

The Red Room trains you to be a Black Widow agent. They throw you in a cell on good days – four cemented walls, nothing else – and give you food on lucky ones. She comes out an assassin, a super-spy. She is picked over Yelena – she is their favorite. She is the best of the best, and she never fails.

But the Red Room does not train you to be a person. She is a killer – the best of the best; no fear, no failure, no heart.

Except Natalia does have a heart. She knows she does. Her heart does not stop beating, and it is the only reason why she is still alive – not because they chose to spare her life, or because she managed to dodge their sharp, sharp knives.

She can hear it when she makes a mistake and they break her bones and throw her into the room without any light and without any food. She can hear its interminable pounding against her chest, its echo in her ears.

Sometimes she wishes it would stop.

-

Darkness is her friend.

She is silence and shadows, and darkness is her only friend.

She feels the pain in her broken wrists and ankles; the Red Room wouldn't break her arms and legs, they needed her for that. She tastes the blood in her mouth and the staleness of the air. She can smell the stench of piss and she can smell blood – whether from herself or from the walls of the room where others before her have stained with their own, she does not know. She can feel the wetness on her skin, and she does not know if it is from her own blood or from the moist, mouldy wall of the room. She cannot see anything.

She thinks of all that she is and all that she is not; she thinks of all the times they sent her undercover, and all the times she’s sunk herself into the role of another person. She is all of them, just as they were all her.

She liked some of those roles. She allows herself to think of what she could have been.

She trusts the darkness; the darkness is her friend. The darkness envelopes her, and the darkness will protect her.

She does not know the exact amount of time it takes – she measures time not by minutes but by the degree of the pain in her broken bones – before the darkness starts to feel suffocating. And then she stops thinking, and stops feeling, and is back to counting her heartbeats.

She is reminded, again, why she does not trust anyone.

-

Natalia knows that sentiment is a weakness.

She sees enough of it every day in the Red Room. She watches wordlessly as the other girls hide small, faded photographs of those they hold dear to them. She watches them flinch and hesitate when shooting a live target.

Sentiment is the last thing she sees in their eyes as they bleed to death because they are not good enough.

She watches them die, one by one, until there is only her and Yelena left.

-

Natalia is trained to fight by thinking, not by feeling.

But she is the best, and she can do both – she is the best because she does both.

Even when the arrow is aimed for the left ventricle of her heart, she is thinking, and she is feeling. Except, she is no longer feeling her instinct, no longer thinking of ways to kill this man – this American man in front of her who has managed to take her down as if she has not spent more than half her life training with the Soviet’s most dangerous weapons.

This is a fight she cannot win.

She feels relief and fear as if she has never felt them before. She wonders at that. She thinks about what the Red Room would do for her if she died – probably nothing. She thinks about what they might do to her if she got captured, if she failed.

She feels the beating of her heart – the hammering in her chest. She thinks of all the times she wished for it to stop.

She does not know what it feels like to have a wish granted, because all of hers have never been.

An arrow to the heart – fast and practically painless in comparison to what she’s been through – it is not a bad way to die.

She thinks of how the American man has heart – he is sparing her the torture of bleeding to her death.

-

The American man does not kill her.

He cocks his head and stares at her. Even then, his aim is perfect, and his expression is unreadable.

She feels her heart beat faster and harder.

She sees it in his eyes – he was sent to kill her. But he does not.

He handcuffs her instead and tells her that the cuffs will tase her if she tries anything funny. She has no idea how they work – the Red Room doesn’t have weapons like that because they eliminate their threats straight away – but she thinks of how similar they are to her Widow’s Bite.

He lowers his bow and she knows doing that is stupid, even if he has already unarmed her long ago. But that is what she knows, not what she thinks – knowing and thinking are very different things, she has learnt. She thinks about how everything he is doing – trusting her enough to put down his weapon, choosing not to kill her – is against what the Red Room has taught her.

She does not put up a fight; does not struggle to get out of her cuffs, even though she knows she probably will not pass out from the electrical shock due to the Black Widow serum. She goes with the American man willingly, and she thinks of how everything she is doing is going against her own set of personal rules.

She thinks of how this is not correct. But it feels right.

-

Natalia learns quickly. The Red Room has made sure of that.

She learns that the American man is named Clint, and she learns of his organization. He does not look at her like she is a monster; he smiles at her and she does not know what to think or what to feel because it is a genuine smile, and no one has given her one in a long, long time.

She watches the people in the plane, and sees the way they look at him – some with awe and intimidation, others with warmth and exasperation – and the way they look at her with fear. She finds it all very foreign. In the Red Room, all twenty-eight of them were rivals, Yelena and she the last of them.

So she watches, and she learns, and thinks of how different all this is.

She feels guilty for feeling that this is right.

-

There is a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, but her heart feels light.

She watches as the director of the organization yells at Clint, and fears for the life of the man who spared hers. She notices that the director calls him Barton, and realizes that everyone in the plane called him the same – she has yet to hear anyone call him Clint. But she has seen his badge, and she knows that Clint is not only his name, but a shorter, more affectionate version of it. She wonders why he told her to call him Clint.

The yelling does not last, and before long, the director dismisses them with a glare. She is surprised to find that both Clint and she are still alive. The Red Room would have killed them both.

Clint gives her a bright smile and tells her that she no longer has to return to the Red Room. Finally, _finally_ , she breaks, and asks him why, _why_ is he doing this.

He says that everyone deserves a second chance, and she agrees, but she does not see how she deserves one, because she was brought up to believe that she did not.

It is not until later that she realizes his life is the first she has feared for.

-

She works well alone. Apparently they work well as a team too.

SHIELD starts sending her and Clint out on simple missions together. She knows they are testing her to see how much they can trust her. She wants to scream at them not to trust her – she is a killer, she is silence and shadows, she has no heart – but she does not because she wants their trust.

She takes three bullets for him in a mission gone wrong – one nearly hits a major artery – and ends up in medical for a week. He spends the week by her bedside when he can, but he is called away by Director Fury often.

When she is finally released from medical, he takes her to Director Fury. He makes an official offer for her to join SHIELD, and the rest of what he says about trust barely registers in her head because the pills are making her drowsy, and because Clint had started nudging her sides from the Director’s second sentence on.

-

A name is a very important thing.

Clint gives her the papers to join SHIELD that evening, and she strikes off Natalia Alianovna Romanova. She contemplates for a moment, and writes Natasha Romanoff above it with a red pen.

She thinks of striking off Black Widow, but decides against it. The Black Widow is, and will always be a part of her. She can erase her past, and she can erase herself, but she will never be able to undo what she has done. She can only atone for it.

Clint knocks repeatedly at her door the next morning, and hands her her own SHIELD badge. He shakes her hand, and says _congratulations, Natasha_ and she allows herself to smile because he does not know that Natasha is an affectionate way of calling a small child with the name Natalia.

Now Clinton is Clint, and Natalia is Natasha.

-

He calls her Natalia sometimes, and she calls him Clinton.

She thinks about how funny it is because Clint and Natasha are supposed to be the affectionate nicknames that come with trust, but now it is the other way round.

It is after Budapest – after the mission that goes horribly, horribly wrong, and she very nearly dies trying to save his life – that he calls her Natalia. She stops for a while, then smiles, and calls him Clinton.

He is the only person who calls her Natalia now.

-

Years later, after they both rise above all they thought they could ever be, after SHIELD has fallen, she thinks about all that has happened.

She thinks of all the things she thought about when they threw her in the room with her broken bones and her beating heart – all she is and all she is not, and all she has become. She thinks about the times she has willed her heart to stop beating.

She is not sentimental, but she is a person, and she has a heart.

She thinks of Clinton, and how he has heart. He is not her light, because they are not that kind of people. He is her match; he is her equal, and the one who ignites a flame in her that burns brighter than her red, red hair and allows her to escape the silence and shadows and darkness.

She thinks of when she signed her SHIELD papers; how she had the chance to take the Black Widow away from herself and why she made the choice not to.

She thinks about how Natasha is Natalia, and Natalia is Natasha, and how she is both of them and the infinite number of others in between, and she smiles.


End file.
